How Do We Know Anything about Life? Where Do Our Thoughts Come from?
Questioner: It’s well known that simple living and high thinking are what we should aim at, but how do we know what is simple living and high thinking?
Acharya Prashant: You talked of simple living and high thinking, and you said that it's well-known that simple living and high thinking are necessary, they are important ideals, we have heard them being emphasized upon so many times, right? So, we take this as some kind of a proven truth, a universal axiom, that one must have high thinking or sometimes that one must have simple living.
The question is, how do we know what is high thinking? How do we know what is simple living? What is the place, from where we are obtaining our definitions?
There is nobody who would want to happily say that his thinking is low or lowly, right? There is nobody who would willingly embrace distorted or narrow or ugly thinking and thoughts, right? So, in his own opinion, all and everybody is going for their version of the right thought. Nobody who is thinking of anything is in his own mind thinking wrongly. In fact, we all think so much because somewhere we are confident of our thoughts and the conclusions that our thoughts would give us.
The fundamental question is, how are we so sure of our thoughts? How are we even sometimes unsure of our thoughts? We have words that are central to our lives, and we have definitions of those words. For example, you use the word simplicity, where does our definition of simplicity come from? How do we classify something as being simple versus it being complex?
